Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I'm going to talk to you about why the media don't get money.
And in order to do that, I just want to tell you who I am to keep you from an afternoon slumber,
and as to why I might be relevant to this question.
So, I was with Reuters, the financial news agency for eleven years - 1994 to 2005.
I started in Brussels. I was the EU environment correspondent.
I wrote about transport and energy and things like that.
So, this is to tell you that my arrival at questions of money and where it came from,
were slightly different to Victoria's there, for example, and also to Ben's.
I listened to his Radio 4 thing this morning on the way in on the train.
He became skeptical about Economics as an undergraduate.
I gradually became skeptical about journalism as a journalist.
So, that happened through covering environmental issues.
If you cover environmental issues, and you're paying anything like some sort of attention,
you come up again and again against the prospect of running the numbers on the story you're covering,
and running the numbers on climate change takes you to a very nasty place.
Running the numbers on biodiversity loss, similarly so, resource use.
And so you start to have to develop a fairly hard shell, or become a manic depressive.
And so my early days at Reuters was,
"This is strange. I'm writing about things which are really quite alarming. Quite a lot of things which are really quite alarming,
and yet I write the stories, and I'm also chasing politicians around dealing with these stories and no one seems to be very alarmed."
And, I found that alarming.
So, as a journalist, journalism is my passion.
I was thinking, "ok, well what's going wrong with journalism. Where's the disjunct here?"
So, it was a perennial question.
And, I was in Brussels for three and a half years, actually covering climate change negotiations as they got off the ground after Rio in 1992.
And just as I was moving, as you do within an organisation like Reuters, you do something for a few years and then you go to another assignment,
I was assigned to London as the gold correspondent, precious metals, commodities.
Just then I'd been covering climate change, and I went to Kyoto to cover the global climate negotiations,
and the European Union was quite progressive.
I knew about the European Union and all the faces,
So, I covered what in Kyoto was a dirty compromise, but it was still quite an optimistic compromise.
It wasn't perfect, but it was for me, as someone following these issues,
it was quite comforting to see at a global level some sort of compromise and progress on clearly what was a problem.
Even though the US at the time under Clinton and Gore said, "yes", and then came out.
Journalistically and what I wasn't writing, because it was very difficult to write,
was it was very clear about the extent of fierce lobbying going on on the part of the oil and gas companies; the energy companies.
And, how the legal process was being undermined at every turn, in Europe, but also globally,
and you could see in other parts of the world.
So, I arrived in London as the gold correspondent with this hinterland of environment; ideas such as climate change,
ideas such as GDP not being a measure of anything sensible,
and how concentrating on GDP growth was positively suicidal from a global environment perpective,
and I come *** into London financial markets blinking.
My background is in; I did a Mechanical Engineering undergraduate degree.
So, I have a science background, and I have a numbers background.
So, I arrived at the financial markets thinking, "ok, I know engineering. This can't be that difficult".
It was at the time where there was the Asian or developing country boom in financial markets.
And, then the subsequent and inevitable bust,
And so I arrived when there was the Asian financial crisis beginning to gather steam.
And, the whole question of derivatives.
Derivatives were a big issue for my job, my new job, as the bullion correspondent.
So, I had to learn derivatives. I had my environmental background,
And leading on to the..because this story will continue..the second slide,
At that time, the most important time of my Reuters career,
Why didn't I get money?
So, this is part confessional. It feels good!
[Laughter from audience]
So, why didn't I get money? I didn't need to.
Pragmatically as I was doing my job then, no one was asking me about money.
I mean Ben was only 12, for example. So, he hadn't got going.
But, part of explaining the question that I'm charged to explain today, which is why media don't get money?
I didn't get it, clearly. But, I didn't know that I didn't get it.
No one was asking me to get it, and my day-to-day reporting was trying to work out what on earth a derivative was and why it mattered to gold,
It was asking myself, as a former environment correspondent,
how I could be writing about this metal which I knew required all sorts of nasty things to leach out: cyanide,
and digging up huge great holes in the ground for tiny tiny amounts of metal, displacing indigenous people.
It's an absurd business, the gold business.
And that was my business. I had to talk to the people trading the stuff, and they are human beings.
I had to get to know them, get them to trust me as not about to burn them because they were doing their business,
and write every day about the gold market; why the price was going up, why it was going down, why that was important and what would happen next.
So, that was my job. Why didn't I get money?
As, I said, I didn't need to, no one was asking me to, I had other things to do, my daily job was to report what the markets were doing, nothing to do with money.
And my client base, to use the word client for a journalist, the audience for my work; they were bankers, they were traders, they were financial analysts, they were hedge funds.
These people don't want to hear a lecture about where money comes from.
They just want to know where the price is going and if they are about to lose their shorts, or whether they are going to get someone else's shorts.
So, that's the second slide.
So, why the media don't understand money.
Those are the elements for me personally.
Like with Victoria, I'm going to give you my subjective view on why the media don't get money.
I can't give you a definitive answer, because it's something that occupies people for days, months, acres of blog or newsprint to debate what's wrong with the media.
So, I'm giving you a totally subjective perspective. I make no excuses for that.
I don't believe there's such a thing as objectivism anyway.
I'm going to go through some of the reasons. These are some of the important ones.
There will be others, and I'm sure you have them yourself.
The health warning is, this is not the truth. This is part of the truth as I see it.
So, reason 1 - Journalists are no smarter than the rest of us.
You will all have your own stories to tell about how you came here today.
There's a point in your trajectory which is, "money, wow, yes Positive Money, that's interesting. Wow, I knew about that. I didn't know about that".
I think it was 60% this morning. Was it Fran or Miriam who asked the audience? You already knew about debt-based money before you came here.
But, there was a point where you didn't know about debt-based money, and there was the lightbulb.
And, so journalists are no smarter than the rest of us, and some would argue, uncharitably, that they are somewhat more stupid, possibly, than the rest of us.
So, there you are. That's the first one.
Journalists tend to flock to those in power. Media stories are about powerful people.
You don't hear many media stories about the person cleaning the street, or the person giving you a Starbucks coffee,
Whatever it is. We journalists go to celebrity, we go to power. That's what journalism has a tendency to do.
I'm not saying it's the right thing, but that is what happens.
One of the consequences of that is that the people in power,
And I mean not just power as in prime ministerial power, but also power as in huge amounts of wealth power,
which is not necessarily expressed in a formal position, but it's certainly expressed in a bank account and a tax haven property, probably.
It's not in the interests of these people to talk to journalists about how money is really made, and the consequences of that.
So, why the media don't understand money. It's not in the interests of the people that they spend their time trying to court, that the journalists understand it.
I touched on that a little bit in my own personal experience. They are under no pressure to understand.
Their editors are not saying, "come on Patrick will you tell me what's this money business",
because their editors don't understand it either. So, there's no pressure for them to find out, so why bother.
You've got a lot of work to do anyway, so get on with it.
Equally, in terms of the audience of these journalists; the audience isn't clammering to understand where money comes from,
because they may not, like you, they may not yet have realised why that would be important,
or they don't even know that they don't know. So, that's another reason.
Journalists are under no pressure to understand.
There's a book by a great journalist. I'm a media critic, I can't conceal it, but there are some fantastic journalists out there.
One of them is a real hero of mine, a fellow called Nick Davies. He works at The Guardian.
He's the man who really single-handedly is responsible for [The] Leveson [Inquiry] having taken place.
He was indefatigable in chasing the phone-hacking story, and he wrote a book called, 'Flat Earth News'.
And in that book he talks about 'churnalism'. That's not his term he took it from someone else, and he credits them,
but churnalism is: you are understaffed, you are under pressure, you are under deadline. Get the bloody thing out.
So, write fast, take the press release in, get the quote from the serving politician, the opposition politician,
the economist, the analyst, and maybe someone on the street, and your job's done, get it out there.
It doesn't lend itself to deep thought. Doesn't lend itself to contrarianism, or taking a view which is out there and risky.
So, they are understaffed, and that is true and it's getting worse.
Journalists as a species are pack animals. I don't know if anyone has read Evelyn Waugh's 'Scoop'.
It's well worth it, very funny. It has examples of journalists as pack animals. They hunt in packs.
They like to pretend they are different, but you look across the front page headlines any day,
and you see the evidence of journalists as pack animals; often it's the same story.
Journalists have their own ideology, which is often the ideology of their editors, their publications, the society as a whole.
The last thirty years, for better or worse, for Conservative or for Labour, frankly, and Lib Dem is free market.
Free market with a health warning, i.e. it's not really free at all, but free market in terms of how people like to paint it, who benefit from it.
But the ideology of journalists is stuck in this free market sense, i.e. free market good, not free market bad.
And the idea that regulation is a bad thing, so we must get rid of it all.
So, the ideology plays through everything. So, if the CBI says, "we need to get rid of red tape".
Journalists cover the story without any critical sense of what does it matter if there is no health and safety coverage for a chainsaw, for example.
Deregulate it, and cut your foot off!
Fear of backlash. 'Flak' I put in brackets.
Julian Assange, at the moment, in the Ecuadorian embassy.
He's not strictly a journalist, although for me, he has many many journalistic elements, and he can tell you a bit about 'flak'.
And it's backlash for having stuck your neck out with the truth. It's not great.
Andrew Gilligan at the BBC. He made a few minor journalistic missteps in his work, for which he has been trashed,
but ultimately what he was saying was *** on the money.
So, 'flak'. Andrew Gilligan can also tell you about that.
So, there are other reasons. I'm sure you could probably throw a few at me.
Some of those are more important than others.
There's a book by Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman, which is called, 'Manufacturing Consent'.
Talks about news filters. Talks about ownership of media organisations, the income of media organisations.
Ideology it touches on. Flak it touches on.
There's another one, but it may be included in there.
But, there are a lot of reasons why media don't get what Positive Money is talking about.
And, I'm going to permit myself, very briefly, a very quick bit on response,
and I'm aware of the time, so I'm going to go through these slides very quickly.
The first one; what we can do.
Conventional media - monitor them, critique errors and omissions, lobby to improve coverage, and find and share better alternative media.
And, I realise that you should never do this in a presentation, rip through a slide like that, but I'm going to beg your indulgence.
And, the second one. What we can do no. 2. We the media, which is you, basically.
Self-educate, which you clearly are doing. Stage film screenings, and debates where you live.
I live in Southwest France. I do that. Next month's February screening is about money. It's not the first one, we've done a couple of other ones.
Champion local innovation. That means real world experiments: time banks, alternative money, credit unions.
Citizen journalism - learn how to be the media yourself. If the media is so bad, and they are, do it yourself.
It's possible, and train others to do it too.
That's it. This is who I am.
Chapter three of this book, 'Fraudcast News', which is my mea culpa with Reuters, and what I think can be done.
Chapter three in that is the fear and greed correspondent, which is me writing for Reuters,
first of all as the commodities/precious metals correspondent and then the FTSE Correspondent.
You can get that for free, that book. As a downloadable free PDF.
It puts the broader picture of not just Positive Money, but actually environmental issues, globalisation problems, civil disobedience in the face of failed governance,
and makes the point about the relationship about journalism and governance.
Really the point of journalism is to serve society, and that's not how it's set up.
It's normally to sell advertising or copies of your organ.
So, you can download that there.
So, the final thing. I'd like to say thank you to Positive Money.
I think the way they are approaching this is spectacularly powerful,
and the reason I come to Positive Money rather than go to a climate organisation is because it is the root of the problem.
Alongside a couple of others, but it is incredibly important work, so that's all I have to say.
[applause]
[Questioner] - Do you think that one of the main factors in why both academics and journalists don't get this is because
a lot of academics and journalists are people from certain backgrounds and certain places in society.
They are often people with a certain amount of privilege.
I say this because, for example, half my family is from Sudan, and I have two cousins, one of whom's older, one of whom's younger.
Both of them have studied Economics, and it was only once they started doing their own research projects on local issues
that they started realising how unhelpful what they'd actually studied was.
Is that a major factor? The fact that the people who have the loudest voices are often the people who aren't affected the most.
[applause]
So, the question of privilege in journalism. I think the short answer is, 'definitely'.
The slightly longer is that journalists tend to be male. They tend to be white. They tend to be middle-aged.
They tend to be middle-class or upper-class. They tend to be Caucasian. They tend to be heterosexual.
So, guilty as charged on all of those.
It also helps if you are slightly balding as well, [laughter] and glasses and orange jumpers!
So, that is the case. I mean it. The answer and there is an answer and it is a happy answer,
which is the age of the internet and technology, the good part of that, is citizen journalism.
You need to learn it. You need to teach it to other people.
There are two great books by the same person on that subject. One is called, 'We the Media'.
The other one is a subsequent book by the same person called, 'Mediactive'. It's a made-up word, 'Mediactive'.
The fellow is called Dan Gillmor. You can download for free both books, or you can pay him money. Excellent publications.
So, yes, we are all those things. It is a huge problem in the conventional media, which is why I advocate alternative citizen media, and real journalism.
Subtitles by the Amara.org community